


Hemos Perdido

by Ghostie



Category: Sicario (2015)
Genre: Angst, Cunnilingus, Drugged Sex, Dubious Consent, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rescue, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-19
Updated: 2015-10-19
Packaged: 2018-04-27 02:45:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5030683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ghostie/pseuds/Ghostie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kate tried to imagine Alejandro loving a woman without pain, without vengeance lurking in the corner of his eyes, and found that she couldn’t. She tried to imagine him kissing his wife, taking off her clothes with reverence, tracing his hands over her body like it was a temple he intended to worship inside. Not fucking her, but making love to her. But there was nothing for her to go on: the only passion she’d ever seen in him was rage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hemos Perdido

The night Alejandro left, Kate stayed up until the early hours of the morning, dark apartment illuminated by the flicker of google images. She kept her hand on the mouse wheel scrolling down, as if eventually there would be no more dead bodies to look at. But there were always more. In the days that followed she drank a lot of cheap tequila, at first from glasses and then from the bottle once there were no more clean glasses left. She stayed off of balconies.

She didn’t leave, in spite of or perhaps because of Alejandro’s advice. Leaving would have been an admission that Juarez, in all its fucked up glory, had happened. Compartmentalization had its uses in her line of work, and what did it matter, anyway? Reggie knew better than to go beyond worried glances when he thought she wasn’t paying attention; Matt and Alejandro had no reason to come back: there was nothing more she had that they could take.

Perhaps it was the denial, perhaps it was the trauma. Either way, she couldn’t help kicking herself when she realized that she’d completely forgotten to account for the cartels.

***

Ten days after Kate signed her soul away at gunpoint she woke up tied to a chair. She opened her eyes slowly, blinking at the light. Not daylight, but the urine yellow cast of old halogens.

“Bienvenido a Juárez.”

Kate looked up at the speaker, waiting for the blurry shapes in her vision to coalesce into something intelligible. She realized her captor was smiling down at her; the whiteness of his teeth shone yellow in the light.

He tutted. “Te comieron la lengua los ratones?”

She took in the black mask over his face. The lopsided eyeholes and loose threads belied that this was no government facility. There was a sinking feeling in her stomach. “Vete a la Chingada,” she hissed.

Her captor chuckled. “Y tú, querida.”

It seemed he’d only wanted to see if she was awake, with a jovial wave he turned around and walked out of the cell. As his footsteps echoed down the hall and Kate busied herself examining her prison. The room was small with no windows; the coolness of the air and the traces of water dripping down the walls hinted that she was underground. The floor was a mess of brown stains she didn’t want to think about, and yet she couldn’t help it, because they were everywhere.

She found herself wishing for the scratchy burlap of the blindfold, and blindness. She tried closing her eyes, but that left her alone with her thoughts, which were less than comforting.

She had no illusions about the possibility of torture or the outcome of it. They would hurt her, she would tell them everything, and then they would kill her; it was as simple as that. You couldn’t keep your mouth shut when your fingernails were being ripped out with rusty pliers. It crossed her mind that she could just tell them everything she knew upfront in return for a sweet silent bullet in her temple. She hated that she considered it; she hated even more that she knew she wouldn’t be able to force the betrayal out of her lips. It wasn’t loyalty or pride. It was something about the way she was built, the way her bones and heart were put together: she would struggle against the pain as long as she could, even knowing it was hopeless.

And oh, the pain. There were photos of women, sometimes, on the internet. She knew what they could do. What they would do. It would hurt. She would cry. She would scream and beg them to stop. They wouldn’t. She would plead, abase herself, roll over. _You are not a wolf._

She bit back a sob; somehow despite all of this it was the thought of _him_ that made her feel like her ribs were being scraped raw from the inside out. What would he do if he saw her now?

Shivering, she realized she could almost imagine him in the room with her. Eyes boring into the back of her skull, fingers light as butterflies on the trigger of his gun, the metal of the barrel cool against the skin of her neck. It was suddenly all too real; she felt herself choking against the memory, sucking in air as hacking gasps, her heartbeat spiraling faster and faster until it was almost a relief when the door to her cell rasped open and her captor entered, accompanied by another man masked in black.

She glanced down to see that one held a pack of cigarettes and a switchblade while the other twirled a pair of pliers and a hammer. She swallowed roughly.

“Miss Macer,” the first man said, his English rough but comprehensible. “We think you may know a few things. Interesting things. You will tell us, yes?”

She probably would, eventually. But not yet. “Go to hell.” Her voice sounded stronger than she felt.

The masked man backhanded her across the face with the pliers; she felt her lip split, winced as the warm blood trickled down her chin. Well. In for a nickel. Raising her head, she spat the blood in the face of her captor.

The blood and saliva caught him on his cheek, dripping down over the fabric of his mask. He grunted in disgust and ripped the mask from his face. Her eyes roved across his features, searching. Patchy stubble, cheeks pockmarked with scars, a nose broken too many times. Then the man met her gaze, and Kate’s stomach dropped. It wasn’t that she recognized him- she’d never seen the man before in her life. But his eyes were cool, and he seemed utterly unconcerned that Kate had seen him, could now identify him in a lineup.

It hit her in the gut. There would never be a lineup. She wasn’t leaving this cell alive.

“So,” he said softly, “you begin to see. Will you tell us, now?”

“Go to hell,” she whispered, the words rote on her tongue.

He nodded, accepting her response perforce before he picked up his pliers again and gestured to his friend, who was leaning against the far wall of the cell with a glowing cigarette between his lips.

“You will remember,” he said, picking up her hand, slipping the pliers underneath the nail of her thumb. “That this was the choice you made.”

“Now. Tell us about Medellin.”

She told them everything, before long. Everything she knew. Everything that had happened. Everything she’d done. Then she told them things that hadn’t happened, things she hadn’t done. And everything in between, lies and promises and pleas, on the off chance that it would make them stop.

It didn’t, of course.

They left, eventually. Alone in the dark with her pain, she allowed herself to think that perhaps that was all they planned to do, all the skin they needed to take. Perhaps they would forget about her and she could slip out of this life from lack of water alone, with some modicum of dignity. Perhaps they would even release her.

They didn’t, of course.

***

She began to lose her grip on reality on the third day, while they worked on the bones of her left hand. She hadn’t eaten since they took her, nor drank more than the few swallows of water they dashed against her face to wake her up. Everything had begun to smudge and darken at the edges like an old photograph. The sounds that reached her ears were delayed, her reactions even more so. And what she did catch was distorted, blurred into an eerie valley where the noises did not quite make sense in either English or Spanish, as if she had heard the words underwater.

They were working on the smallest finger when it started. In between screaming and begging and telling them to go fuck themselves with cactuses, she began to hear fireworks. She couldn’t see them. But she could imagine the way they would burst in the sky and could almost see the afterimages on the backs of her eyelids, bursting purple and yellow like bruises when she blinked. Some were near, some further away, some mere echoes in the distance. She listened as the noises became louder and louder, the bursts closer and closer.

It took seconds or minutes or hours to notice that there were no new pains in her hands and she was alone with the old ones, which were by now old friends. Her torturers were gone, and the fireworks had gone silent, though the flares still bloomed when she closed her eyes.

When she opened them again there was a figure in the doorway, silhouette stark black against the shadow of the hall. He stood in a fighting stance, body slanted sideways to minimize the target he presented, knees bent slightly. He hugged his gun in the crook of his right arm; he held a knife in his other hand, pointing away. Scanning the room he checked for threats, and then he was stepping towards her, out into the light so that the planes of his face were illuminated.

Kate felt something constrict in her throat. “You,” she croaked.

Alejandro looked the same as he ever had; the wet stains on his body armor that would be red to the touch could have been from any night she’d seen him kill someone. Eyes on her, he moved forward, gun still gripped at his side, knife still in hand. Kate heard her chair creak as she flinched and leaned backwards.

He stopped in his tracks. There was a strange look in his eyes. “You’re afraid,” he murmured.

Afraid? She was trembling and there were sounds burbling up out of her throat. Laughing, she was laughing, and maybe crying too. “Should I- should I _not…?”_

He shook his head. “You’re afraid of _me_.”

She was laughing hard enough that they could probably hear her in El Paso now, but she couldn’t stop.

He stared at her for a moment longer before muttering something under his breath and sliding the knife through her bindings. She was still laughing when he slid one arm around her back, slung her legs over the over arm, lifted her, and carried her out of her cell.

Her laughter died as he lugged her through the tunnels connected to her holding room. There were bodies- there were bodies everywhere. She saw the man with the black mask resting against an earthen wall, his limbs akimbo and his neck resting at an odd angle against his chest. She saw the man with the hammer face-down on the ground, black stains spreading from his chest into the thirsty sand. After the fifth body she stopped counting. She glanced up at Alejandro, studying him. The slight huff of his breath and flecks of blood on his cheek the only indications that he’d fought his way to her and left a trail of corpses that ran knee deep in places.

It was quiet when they emerged from the tunnels into the cool night. There were no waiting soldiers, no gleaming black Tahoes, no lights. There was only the crunch of Alejandro’s boots against the earth, the wind snapping at their clothes, and the silent fall of starlight against the black sky. “The others…” she muttered into his chest.

He didn’t stop moving, after a moment she was able to make out the outline of a car on the horizon, dark and empty. “No others. Just me.” She felt his muscles tense; if he were anyone else she would have said he was upset. Angry even. But with him, who could tell? “They told me not to come for you. Said it wasn’t worth the risk.”

Somewhere in her there might have been a sullen coal of bitterness, but she was too tired to coax it into anything more. “But you came.”

“I came.”

She let the walk lull her, somehow soothed by the rhythmic throb of her hands and feet at each of his steps. “Came to kill me then,” she finally mumbled into the warmth of his shirt. “Didn’t want me to tell anyone. Made me promise.” She wondered where he would do it, if it would be fast or slow. She wondered if he would remember where he buried her, or if he would bury her at all.

Alejandro was silent. After a moment Kate flopped her head onto her other shoulder so she could look up at him. “You should kill me now, then. I told them everything I knew.”

God, she hated that she felt sorry for failing to keep a secret she never wanted to keep in the first place. Hated that she had almost apologized to _him,_ after everything he’d done _._ Hated that a part of her would have meant the apology. “Should kill me,” she mumbled again, softer now. “That’s why you came.”

“No. It’s not.”

She thought of arguing with him. Because, well, why else would he come? But the night was cold despite the warmth of Alejandro’s chest, and even the throb of her hands and feet wasn’t enough to keep her from sinking into a muddy sleep.

As she slipped under she could have sworn she felt a hand smoothing back her hair. But it couldn’t have been Alejandro, because the fingers were gentle against her skin.

***

When she next woke the pain was terrible. Her hands were on fire, her body ached, and her skin was one gigantic bruise.

She blinked her eyes open and realized she was on a bed in a dark room, and there was a hazy figure sitting in a chair by the opposite wall, watching her. She tried to push herself up, cursing her weakness- but let herself fall back onto the pillows when she realized it was only Alejandro. Only Alejandro. To think that he was a comforting sight: the Kate Macer of a weak ago would have laughed herself sick.

She lofted her head to look at him. “Where-?” she rasped.

“An old house of mine, for being away from people. On the coast. No one will find you here.”

“How long?”

He stood from his chair, plucking a glass of water from the bedside table. “Two nights and a day,” he said. “I bandaged each and every one of your wounds with disinfectant. I fed you broth a bit at a time, like children do with kittens too weak to drink milk from their mothers.”

She licked her cracked lips at the glass of cool water he held in his hands. Shifting, she reached for it- and cried out as a sharp agony ignited in the joints of her ruined hand and shot up her arm. Each twitch or tremor set off a new series of white hot pains as skin stretched and exposed flesh met with air.

Alejandro waited until she had fallen back against her pillow, panting and sheened in sweat, to lift the water to her lips. “I did not give you painkillers in your sleep,” he explained. “I did not think you would have appreciated being drugged.”

There were no considerations of whether he was right or not, only the fire in her hands and the water on her lips. She drank greedily; and the water felt like ice as she swallowed, freezing downward into her stomach and her veins. He pulled the glass away too soon and it felt like the worst betrayal, worse than any he’d visited on her before. Which was saying something.

He tutted. “You’ll make yourself sick.”

Her neck was stiff and it hurt to move but she managed to look up and stare at him. “You shot me once,” she said. It hurt to speak; her throat was scraped to hell from five days of screaming. He was a smart man; she figured he would understand without elaboration. You shot me, why do you care what I drink? You shot me, why did you offer me water? You shot me, why did you come back for me at all?

But he simply nodded gravely and sat down on the bed beside her so that his thigh rested against her shoulder and she could see his face without sitting up. “I did.”

He wasn’t getting away from this so easily; he could hold a gun to her head again if he really wanted her to shut up. “I didn’t- I didn’t ask for any of this; I didn’t _want_ this and _you,_ you, now you give me water and I can’t, I can’t-

And he was raising his hand from where it rested at his side and reaching out towards her, and she was flinching away- _pain, razors pliers-_

“Kate!”

She blinked and saw that there were no weapons in his hand, only two small pills resting in the center of his palm.

Slowly she relaxed, letting out her breath in shaky gasps until her breathing had steadied. “Don’t do that again.” She tensed as soon as the words had left her mouth- shouldn’t have shown him weakness; he could exploit that. The masked man in the cave always paid more attention to the inches of skin that made her scream louder. She half expected Alejandro to laugh, to tell her that this was how wolves were- but he simply nodded and shifted himself back on the bed so that another foot of space hung between them. “Do you trust me?” he asked, carefully showing her the pills again.

How could he ask that? Yes, with a common enemy and guns in hand. No, as soon as she stepped between him and that enemy. Yes, to be exactly what he was. No; he’d come back for her. Yes. No. “When it comes to drugs,” she finally managed to say.

Chuckling, he raised the pills to her lips with exaggerated motions, telegraphing his movements like one might to a frightened dog. “They will take the pain away.”

Silently she opened her mouth; he laid the pills on the tip of her tongue and raised the water glass with his other hand. His fingers were gentle on her chin as she swallowed the pills, and when he withdrew to replace the glass on her bedside table a part of her wanted to grab them and put them back on her skin. She had forgotten what it felt like to be touched without pain following.

He saw the twitch of her finger and misinterpreted it. “It will take a few minutes for them to kick in, I am afraid. But when they do you will not hurt.”

“My hands won’t hurt,” she corrected, because it seemed an important distinction to make.

He shrugged. “There are other ways to deal with the rest of the pain.”

Kate had begun to feel a delicious fog at the edges of her consciousness. She ignored it and glared up at him. “I suppose I could become a remorseless killer and fuck off to dispense vigilante justice in other countries.”

He didn’t take the bait, just favored her with another slow nod. “You could. I wouldn’t recommend it.”

There were a million things she wanted to say, about hypocrisy and sociopathy and being an asshole in general. But she was too tired for any of it. And everything she could have said, he’d have thought of before, told himself, and ignored.

“You should rest.” He stood, flicked the light off and headed towards the door. Kate felt a sudden pang of fear. It was a new moon; even with the window open, the room was dark and the shadows were long. She had seen the masked man dead, she had _seen_ the bits of brain flecked against the wall where he had fallen. And yet she was alone and immobile in the blackness. “Alejandro?” she called out, wincing at the way her voice broke on the last syllable.

Pausing in the doorway she was struck by the memory of his silhouette at the entrance of her cell. But they weren’t in her cell. Maybe if she repeated it to herself she would believe it. “Yes, Kate?”

Fuck it. “Sleep next to me?” she mumbled, and if she hated herself for asking it she hated herself even more for how weak and afraid she had sounded when she did.

But he didn’t mock her or smirk; he nodded solemnly and shut the bedroom door behind him. Setting himself on the bed gingerly, he lay down next to Kate’s back so that each limb was carefully distanced from her body, as if he was afraid she would spook at a light touch.

She found she didn’t have the patience for this dancing around of his, and rolled her head into the crook of his arm, her ruined hands resting in the hollow between their chests. “I may start screaming as soon as I fall asleep,” she whispered, remembering the way he’d twitched on the plane, the animal terror in his eyes when he woke and saw her, no recognition on his face.

He considered this. “After… I woke up screaming every night for six months,” he said into the quiet, the words tickling the hairs on her forehead. His hand moved to rest above her head, stroking her head gently in the dark.

He woke up screaming after what? After he was tortured? After he saw his wife and daughter die? After he’d done any of the horrible things she’d seen him do? After he’d done all the other things she hadn’t seen? “Do you ever have nightmares about the people you’ve murdered?” she whispered.

He smiled. “Would you feel better if I said I did?”

She didn’t have an answer to that. As she tried to find a way to put the rawness in her chest into words, the fog of the medicine rose up around her and dragged her into sleep.

***

Kate woke to sunlight streaming through the windows and an empty bed.

Wrapping herself in a blanket, she hobbled to the balcony on the far side of the bedroom. Every step caused her fingers to throb, and the pain and frustration of fumbling with the door handle almost made her burst into tears. She gritted her teeth and tried harder; she needed to feel the sunlight on her skin. It had been days in that dark pit and a part of her had given up on ever seeing the sky again, or feeling the wind in her hair.

The door finally took pity on her and she stumbled outside, feeling eighty years older than she had a week before. But the effort was worth it when she looked off the balcony. The sea stretched out in every direction, blue and perfect. The house sat on a lonely promontory; there was nothing to the north or the south but miles of black rocky shore and the white surf that pounded against it. There were no other humans in sight, and she thought she might weep from the freedom of it.

There were spots on the water; she squinted, trying to make out the distant forms. And then one burst up in flight, flapping ungainly wings against the sky, a fish wriggling in its claws. They were pelicans. Dozens of them, waddling over the tops of the outcroppings, bobbing up and down just before the wave break. She watched as one, lazing in an air thermal, suddenly caught sight of a fish and careened into the ocean, only to surface a moment later with a disgruntled expression on its face and no fish to show for its efforts.

The whole thing was so idyllic that she couldn’t help but laugh out loud.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you laugh.”

She turned to see Alejandro standing in the shade of the bedroom, holding a glass of water and another pair of pills. She accepted them in silence, and moved so that there was room on the balcony for him to stand next to her. They stood side by side for a time, until Kate’s hands were pleasantly numb and the daze of the medicine paired with the antics of the pelicans was enough to coax true laughter up from her stomach.

Alejandro shifted, turning to lean on the railing. “You remind me of…”

Something clenched in her chest. “Your daughter, I know.”

But no, he was shaking his head. “You remind me of my daughter when you cry. You remind me of my wife when you laugh.”

Kate froze. Slowly, she turned to face him. “Your wife?”

“My wife, yes.” Pausing, he looked back from the pelicans to give her a look she couldn’t decipher. “Her name was Gabriela. She liked them.” He waved his hand out at the ocean without taking his eyes off Kate. “The pelicans, I mean.”

Kate made a noncommittal noise and looked back out at the ocean. She tried to imagine him loving a woman without pain, without vengeance lurking in the corner of his eyes, and found that she couldn’t. She tried to imagine him kissing his wife, taking off her clothes with reverence, tracing his hands over her body like it was a temple he intended to worship inside. Not fucking her, but making love to her. But there was nothing for her to go on: the only passion she’d ever seen in him was rage. She opened her mouth to speak, then shut it. This was a terrible idea. But she was curious. Reggie used to say it was a character flaw. He’d have killed her if he knew what she was about to say. If Alejandro didn’t get there first. But what was one more brush with death? “I remind you of Gabriela,” she said, her mouth dry. “Did you hold a gun to her head too?”

If the sharpening of his nostrils and the whitening of his knuckles weren’t signs that she’d gone too far, the tension in his voice would have been. “I would be very careful, if I were you.”

But Kate found she couldn’t stop herself. Where could she push him with this? What lurked beyond that razor sharp composure she’d seen? “Well, I guess she’s dead so you might as well have-“

She didn’t get to finish her sentence because Alejandro was suddenly inches from her, hands in barely restrained fists, teeth bared. He was ready to hit her, she could tell. There was violence in every one of his joints ready to spring out towards her. It was that tunnel with the strike team all over again, except now there was no mission to distract him, no witnesses to protect her. _Never point a gun at me._

A smarter person would have left well enough alone. Apologized, even. But she had to know if the man who had loved without hatred was still in there. It was who she was; she couldn’t back down without knowing. She hadn’t in Juarez; she wasn’t about to start now.

So she leaned forward and kissed him.

It felt like kissing a statue, at first. He was frozen beneath her lips, eyes wide, hands limp at his sides.

She kissed him again, a light brush of her lips over his, feeling the scratch of his stubble against her chin. It occurred to her that their roles were reversed: for once in all the time she’d known him she was the one who knew everything, who was in control, and he was the one grasping for straws of meaning in the dark. She found she liked it.

She parted her lips, let them drag over his for a third time- and then some dam inside him broke and he was kissing back, hands surging up to pull her closer and pressing her against him, an animal growl in his throat.

There was no sharply honed focus or clinical detachment to his kisses: he was wild, on the edge of losing control. She’d never seen him like this.

She brought her hands up to cradle his head without thinking, and let out a yelp when the motion reminded her of all of the pains she was harboring, the bandages covering her hands, the missing skin and the broken bones.

And just like that, he froze. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, pulling back, eyes dazed like he wasn’t quite sure what had happened.

She put her hands on her head, mimicking the position of a hostage. And wasn’t that ironic. “Not going to hurt my hands,” she corrected. “Too late for the rest.”

He stared at her for a moment, lips parted, panting. As if she’d trapped him in this somehow, as if he couldn’t bear to stop or go forward. Fighting against the haze of the painkillers, she realized she wouldn’t be able to bear it if he pulled away, if this was the closest she ever got to touching him without his mask on. Hands still crossed limply above her head, she swayed forward, to kiss him or to crumple on the floor, she wasn’t sure.

Perhaps it was the swaying that did it; he rushed forward to catch her, laid his hands on either side of her ribs, and didn’t seem able to let go. His breath was hot against her neck, the muscles of his arms taut as he held her.

And then he was sinking to his knees before her, his hands skimming down over her shivering stomach to rest on her hips, fingers fluttering against the inch of bare skin between her jeans and the hem of her shirt, pulled high by the position of her arms overhead.

He paused there, kneeling to look up at her. “Did they…?”

She shook her head. “No. They were… they said they were waiting for that.”

He hesitated, nodded. “That’s good.” And then seemed to realize how utterly inadequate that was, winced, and leaned back on his heels. She could feel his heartbeat hammering where he touched her, Yet he didn’t move closer like he clearly wanted to, just looked up at her with unblinking eyes, and she surfaced from the haze of the drugs to realize that he wanted her permission to continue.

She opened her mouth, closed it. _Please,_ was on the tip of her tongue but she’d begged before, too recently, and she found she couldn’t force the words out, couldn’t ask for this. She looked for words that didn’t remind her, didn’t drag her back into the darkness, but couldn’t find any. Helpless, she looked down at him-

And realized that he understood. That he too, had been in a cell like hers, knew what it was to beg to a man in a mask, what it did to you. How it unmade you.

She couldn’t let herself think about what he’d been doing in that cell of his, or whether he’d been the one wearing the mask and doing the unmaking.

Holding her breath, she slipped one arm off of her head and reached down to rest her bandaged hand on his head. Gently, she pushed him forward.

That was all the encouragement he needed, apparently.

Like a coiled spring, he was kneeling between her legs, pulling her jeans down, rough fingers threading under the waistband of her underwear and yanking them down to her knees. He clung to her like a drowning man, one arm wrapped around each of her thighs, holding her upright against the balcony. He moved like he was subduing a target, all focus and intent.

She let out a gasp at the graze of stubble against her skin first, then, at the first touch of his lips, a cry. Then his tongue was sliding against her, probing deeper, and there were no words left in her.

The pleasure built in steady waves, edged with the occasional scratch of his beard or clench of his fingernails when she let out a particularly loud moan.

She wasn’t sure how long it went on, how long he held her in a vise between the cool iron of the balcony railing and the heat of his tongue. She was floating on some other plane: between the warm haze of the drugs, the distant throb of her hands, and the lazy pleasure of Alejandro’s tongue, time seemed inconsequential.

Finally it was all too much; Alejandro’s tongue pressed against her and the pleasure surged over the edge of her drugged haze, sending her spiraling, white bursts going off behind her eyes.

Her knees buckled and she fell into his arms gasping and shivering as he kissed her over and over, murmuring in Spanish and English into her ears and against her lips like prayers. When she was spent, a shivering husk on the floor, he lifted her and carried her inside to bed.

***

He drove her back across the border in the evening. It was a silent car ride; Kate dozed for most of it. Occasionally she woke for a few brief moments to see him watching her with an unreadable expression on his face. Once she woke screaming, and he coaxed her out of the cell in her nightmare, shushing softly and rubbing circles into her shoulder with his fingers.

They made it back to her apartment complex by midnight. He let her out of the car silently and walked her up to her door before turning to go.

“Alejandro.”

He paused, standing so that she could see the side of his face cast orange in the lights of the parking lot, but didn’t turn to face her. “What.”

“I need to know why you came back.”

He sighed and turned around. His eyes, which had been so wide when he kissed her by the ocean, were shuttered. “You should never have gotten involved in any of this. We needed a bogey. It didn’t have to be you.”

“But you still came back for me.”

He didn’t answer her unspoken question, though she knew he knew it was there, hanging in the air between them. “You should have left when I told you to.”

And that, that was just too rich. “You can’t do that,” she said. “You can’t shoot me and then hold me at gunpoint and then break me out of hell and fuck me and give me life advice like you _care_ about what happens to me.”

He was shaking his head. “You’re an innocent. I never wanted you to get hurt. I told you to go away.”

She tried to muster up outrage, but all she could feel was cold. “But I didn’t.”

“No, you kept on fighting a war you knew you would never win, following rules that did nothing but hinder you along the way.

She thought of the bodies on the street at the border. Of the bodies in the tunnel. He’d barely noticed them. She thought of his face when she’d kissed him, his shock at a gentle touch. “Rules that kept me human.”

“Nothing but hinder you,” he repeated, and yet his voice had none of the rancor she would have expected. There was no fury in him at that moment, only sadness.

There was nothing she could say to that, nothing that would appeal to the humanity he was so eager to cut out of himself like a cancer. They stood in silence and she was helpless to end it. Finally he nodded to her. “Take care of yourself,” he murmured. And then he was leaving, walking down the steps of her apartment, crossing the parking lot. This time, he did not look back.

She watched him go, until his car was nothing more than two embers on the highway, disappearing into the night.

She began packing her apartment into boxes the next day.


End file.
